Partnerships and the organization

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This is the third part of my response. See Part 1: Corporate Learning’s Focus & Part 2: Integrating learning into the business.

Inspired by Jay Cross, Amanda Fenton asks how her Corporate Learning department could better meet the needs of employees. I think these are excellent questions and the answers form the basis of addressing how to integrate work and learning in the enterprise.

Q7) How can we help support learning environments (resources and tools, relationships and networks, training and education, supervisor and company support) in a way that is highly efficient and scalable across the country? What are the programs and services that are supported centrally and what do we support through consulting? Through self-serve resources? What capacity needs to be developed in the organization to support all these areas? How can we better advocate the use of social software to enable high performance?

Jane Hart, in the state of learning in the workplace, sums up a more efficient & scalable approach; do-it yourself (DIY):

With the easy availability of tools, people are now “doing their own thing”. This is not just the case for those who are designing and/or delivering training or education for formal learners, but also by many to address their own learning and performance needs. There is a huge amount of evidence that shows that individuals (and teams) are using these tools for their own personal, informal learning. Instead of going to the LMS to find answers to their questions or solve problems, they are using tools like Google, Wikipedia or YouTube, or simply posting questions to their networks on Twitter or Facebook in order to get immediate, up-to-date and relevant answers. It is interesting to note that the success of their “learning” is measured in how well it helps them to address the learning or performance issue in hand, not in course completion data in the LMS. In very many cases, individuals are therefore now directing and managing their own learning primarily though the use of these new tools.

All these factors are influencing the look of learning in the workplace …

As Charles Jennings shows in this very articulate presentation, 8 reasons to focus on informal & social learning, that learning happens as a process, not a series of events. Studies have shown that up to 90% of workplace learning happens outside of formal training. This is what needs to be supported, but not controlled, by the organization. Informal learning is generally more effective, less expensive and better received than formal training. Informal is more scalable than formal. Central control is only necessary for about 10% of workplace learning and this is the portion of resources that should be allocated to it. The graphic below (slide 32) clearly shows how ineffective typical formal training can be:

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The data and research are available. Advocating for a better balance of learning options inside the enterprise depends on how well the training department understands its own organization.

Q8) What would an integrated OD, HR, IT, KM, Marketing/Communications and L&D partnership look like? How would our roles, responsibilities and structure change? Who does the manager or employee call when they run into a performance problem? What big organizational beliefs do we need to let go of to support these changes?

Euan Semple has tarred HR, Communications and IT with the same brush. Euan says that:

  • HR are “maintainers of order, rather than enablers of staff”;
  • Communications manages rather than enables communication;
  • IT controls risk instead of enabling the business.

These are generalizations, but expose the weaknesses of our current management systems.

The same workplace issues are being faced by HR, IT, OD, KM, Marketing/Communications and T&D departments. Similar complaints and parallel strategies are being developed in isolation in each of these areas. We really need to get away from our self-imposed tribes and adopt network thinking and practices. All levels of complexity exist in our world but more of our work (especially knowledge-intensive work) deals with complex problems, whether they be social, environmental or technological. Complex environments and problems are best addressed when we organize as networks; our work evolves around developing emergent practices; and we collaborate to achieve our goals.

With hyper-linked information and access to expertise, not only are all internal support departments of less value, they can actually subvert the organization’s future by not responding quickly and appropriately. We need to look to business models on the fringes that foster a sense of community and focus on agility and autonomy. No single, sure-fire, cookie-cutter approach can be implemented in a top-down or consultant-driven manner to create a networked workplace performance model that works. There are no best practices, only next practices.

We can start by recombining organizational DNA, breaking down silos and inverting the organizational pyramid.

Integrating learning into the business

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This is the second part of my response. See Part 1: Corporate Learning’s Focus.

Inspired by Jay Cross, Amanda Fenton asks how her Corporate Learning department could better meet the needs of employees. I think these are excellent questions and the answers form the basis of addressing how to integrate work and learning in the enterprise.

Questions on the role of managers and integrating learning into the business:

Q5) How can we facilitate the line managers’ ability to identify the root cause of a performance problem, own it, and know what to do about it (e.g. managing performance problems)?

The situation has gone beyond the case of  helping managers develop a few new skills for their professional toolbox. Transformational, not incremental, changes are needed.

The basic premises of most current management and organizational models no longer apply. These frameworks are based upon work that is being automated and outsourced every day. There is little time to prepare people for this change. Any scenario that I consider – peak oil, global warming; globalization; Asian dominance – still requires that the developed world’s workforce deals with more complexity and even chaos. We need to skill-up for emergent and novel practices and that means a completely different mindset toward work and the “supervision” of work. Knowledge artisans don’t need supervision as much as the reduction of barriers to communication and connection. That’s the role of the “supervisor”.

Here are two other examples.

Ev Williams, co-founder of Twitter, is doing everything he can to keep the company BELOW 150 people. He understands both the old (primates & Dunbar’s numbers) as well as the new (agility & networks). For the past century, the key has been to grow companies. It’s celebrated and rewarded by markets and pundits. Not any more. This company is not growing and not hiring more managers and supervisors. In the new organization, everybody is an independent contributor because there is no need for layers of command and control. Everyone talks to everyone else in this hyperlinked world.

This is one the fastest growing occupations today – community manager. The skills needed here are completely different from traditional command and control supervision. Soft skills are now the hard skills. Supervision is not needed when all work is transparent.

Q6) What if we closed the training department and became mentors, coaches and facilitators, where our focus was on improving core business processes, supporting communication and collaboration to help people perform better, faster, cheaper? Where we worked with managers to fund and develop appropriate tools and processes for employees? How could this be successful?

I would reword this question to: when the training department closes, what do we do? That’s what most people in the business of organizational training should be asking. This will happen with or without the training department. The future of the training department is to stop delivering content and focus on conversations and collaboration. Here’s an example of one of the best “training” programs developed by people who are not instructional designers: CommonCraft “In plain English” videos. There are thousands like this on the Net (e.g. Wiki-How). Add in just-in-time answers to questions on Twitter or Facebook and you have a learning ecosystem. Many workers no longer need the training department to learn. In fact, the training department is often a barrier to learning.

Trainers had better become mentors, coaches and facilitators very soon, or they will become irrelevant in an age of ubiquitous access to content and expertise.

Normal isn't normal anymore

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Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week.

My piece “teamwork, real work and the wicked enterprise” on @cmswire – via @deb_lavoy

Some problems are such complex, entangled, multifaceted hairballs that we cannot approach them alone. They change and morph as quickly as our ability to understand them. They are known to academics as “wicked problems.”

In modern enterprises, we need a new way to talk about these wicked problems, as well as new approaches to address them. Normal isn’t normal anymore. Change is the norm.

Trends in Knowledge Management – “a short synthesis & worth a read”:

Traditionally, KM was more often than not a top-down driven approach. For example, document taxonomies and knowledge sharing procedures were defined; identified experts shared their knowledge in defined communities.

Today, we can identify six strong trends that lead into new concepts of knowledge sharing and collaboration:

The obsession with purely technology driven solutions to wicked problems is dangerous. via @snowded

My takeaway was simple: Just as a previous generation confused correlation with causation we are now confusing simulation with prediction. We need to realise that the obsession with purely technology driven solutions to wicked (or as I prefer intractable) problems is dangerous and we need to see technology as augmenting human cognition, triggering extended human sensor networks into states of anticipatory awareness; rather than trying to anticipate the inherently unpredictable.

Free as in Freedom: The State of Learning in the Workplace Today. via @sumeet_moghe

I’ve just scrambled into Jane Hart’s session about the state of learning in the workplace today. This is a guide in soundbites and images and is a way to summarise the excellent guide on Jane’s website that a lot of us have already seen. I’m a self-confessed fan of the incredible thinking that the Internet Time Alliance put out, so I am sitting through the session even though I already comprehend the material.

The traditional approach to workplace learning has been about managing and controlling the learning experience, keeping it really top down. There are 10 factors that are shaping the new era of workplace learning.

@hjarche thinking that you may find this interesting from a #pkm [personal knowledge management] perspective. via @mikey3982 & @doctorblogs

My conclusion is the information problem is now so big, that we need to do things radically differently, instead of doing more of the same. So perhaps in the future we’ll see wiki-Cochrane reviews or clinical trials on YouTube. Otherwise, the only remaining solution may be for doctors and researchers to set up an Information-Users Anonymous support group. We could start each meeting by solemnly declaring the first of the twelve steps: “We are powerless over information – and our lives have become unmanageable”. I hope it doesn’t come to this.

Corporate Learning’s focus

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Inspired by Jay Cross, Amanda Fenton asks how her Corporate Learning department could better meet the needs of employees. I think these are excellent questions and the answers form the basis of addressing how to integrate work and learning in the enterprise.

Q1) Close to 80% of learning happens informally and 20% formally, yet we spend most of our time and money on the 20%. How could we better support this and shift our time and money?

There are a few ways to address this imbalance.

The organization can adopt a performance improvement perspective and ensure that all formal training meets a need. HPT (human performance technology) is a broader design approach and should be seen as an enabler to get to instructional systems design (ISD). Without the proper analysis of the organizational needs, constraints and performance factors, a “learning” project may be doomed from the onset, because too often, training is a solution looking for a problem. By doing a performance analysis, it becomes obvious that many performance problems do not require training. I have developed a performance analysis job aid which is available for non-commercial use.

Another approach would be to divert or expand training funds to support informal learning. This could start small but would show that informal learning is important to the organization.  Starting small makes sense because the essence of implementing informal learning is giving up control. This can be scary for managers used to tight command and control. Start with the message that training  addresses less than ten percent of workplace performance. That might get somebody’s attention. Then look at ways to help with the other 90% of work.
One final note, don’t try to formalize informal learning.

Q2) Novices and experts have very different needs (curve from formal to informal). What needs to be in place to better support those differences? How can we support these differences across diverse business units (sales, service and specialized functions)?

Jay Cross and Clark Quinn have used this to explain the formal/informal mix by level of experience:
The above graphic is a good rule of thumb but should not be adhered to slavishly, as there are cases where informal learning works for new hires. I would look at ways to support do-it-yourself learning at all levels.

Q3) How can we shift from teaching content to developing search & find skills, critical thinking skills, creative thinking skills, analytical skills, networking skills, people skills, and reasoning and argument skills?

Organizations should start with Dan Pink’s advice – create an environment where workers have autonomy, mastery and a sense of purpose. A key factor in innovation is to allow people to do meaningful work, in their own way.  The skills listed in this question directly relate to critical thinking. Teaching critical thinking skills may take some time for people used to getting content served on a platter and then being tested on short-term mastery of that content. I don’t see these changes happening overnight.

There are web tools that can be used for critical thinking skills, but tools are not enough. Good informal learning skills are directly linked to critical theory – to question authority, seek the truth and question our own perceptions of reality. All workers need to be good learners but learning cannot be controlled externally, only supported. I like this quote from an unlikely source, Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood: “I was going to Martha Graham [College] partly to get away from Lucerne, but also I had to do something so I might as well get an education. That’s how they talked about it, as if an education was a thing you got, like a dress.”
Start by giving up total control of the training process and focus instead on connecting & communicating.

Q4) What training programs do we need to provide, at minimum,  for legal compliance purposes?

Compliance training is a symptom of the current disconnect between learning and working. Meeting compliance training objectives is usually not a worthwhile goal for the organization, though it may keep executives out of jail. Ray Jimenez summed up the issues with this type of training when he commented on my post, compliance of an industry:

“This is bold, cut and dry and thanks for the exposition.

I see debilitating effects across the training industry when many of our training colleagues accept “compliance” as the norm for training. a good example is the blind loyalty to testing for retention with little concern for applications in real-job situations.

Why not fight this culture? I might be wrong, but our industry might be too “onion-skinned” to accept self-reflections and self-criticisms that we rather continue to hide the dirty linens than confront them.

How do we lift ourselves out of this mindset?”

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In subsequent posts, I look at Amanda’s other questions on:

Making connections

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I haven’t attended a large face-to-face conference in the learning field for over a year, so DevLearn 2010 was a new experience after so much professional time mostly online. The biggest difference was the sense of community, which I can directly attribute to micro-blogging, or Twitter. For the first time I met dozens of friends and colleagues with whom I had already established relationships and shared various aspects of my life. Fellow Tweeps (as some folks call them) don’t just say hi, they give you a great big hug. Fellow bloggers hardly ever do that.

Twitter has significantly changed the nature of online relationships. Facebook connects people who have usually already met. Blogs share bigger ideas and thoughts. LinkedIn is an online version of the old Rolodex. Twitter strips bare our communication by limiting it to 140 character bursts which gradually meld into a stream from which patterns emerge. These patterns are not intended or designed by the originator, but sensed by the observer. It’s difficult to hide your true personality on Twitter. Each person I met confirmed my impressions on Twitter.

Later in the conference, we saw how the #lrnchat gang at DevLearn emerged as a visible tribe on Thursday evening. I am sure that at next year’s DevLearn the name tags will include a Twitter identifier [take that as a hint, Brent Schlenker].

Twitter is becoming an important connection machine. Via one of my Twitter pals, Paul McConaughy, aka @minutrition, I watched this fascinating video yesterday:

Dr. Brené Brown says that, “Connection is why we’re here; it’s what gives purpose and meaning to our lives. This is what it’s all about.” What keeps many people out of connection is that they feel they are not worthy of connection. Brown explains that people with a stronger sense of belonging believe they are worthy of love and belonging. These people also fully embrace vulnerability. Her conclusion, from many observations and interviews, is that the best way to live is with vulnerability and to stop controlling and predicting. To me, this sounds like adopting a perspective of life in perpetual Beta. I think that the vulnerability we show when embracing social media is actually a path to a better life. All of those embraces at DevLearn are pretty strong evidence of that.

Friday's Finds post-DevLearn 2010

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Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past:

“Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and diligence.” – Abigail Adams via @Adisaan

“What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.” – Thoreau via @shauser

“the learning profession is the hole in the data donut” – Ellen Wagner @edwsonoma at DevLearn 2010

Or, as noted thought leader Ted Williams said, “If you don’t think too good, don’t think too much.” via @Dave_Ferguson

Hierarchies are systematically stupid and inefficient, for the following reasons … via @prem_k

People in authority make stupid decisions because the people who know more than they do are their subordinates, and the only people who can hold them accountable know even less than they do.

The only way the people doing the work can get anything done is to treat irrational authority as an obstacle to be routed around, the same way the Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it.

In a complex environment, analysis loses its primacy & long-term planning becomes impossible. via @downes

Book: Mojo in its purest form is an internal positive spirit toward what you’re doing which shows on the outside: via @marshallgoldsmith

Note: now I need to reflect on all the other things I came across and learned at the DevLearn 2010 conference in San Francisco.

Media, Messages & Mobility

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Anthropologist Michael Wesch, noted for his studies of YouTube and video sharing states, “when media change, then human relationships change”.

Today, at the DevLearn2010 social media camp, I will be conducting a discussion with my Internet Time Alliance colleagues on mobile learning, but I would like to focus on how the mobile medium changes our relationships with sharing knowledge, connecting with others and getting things done.

For example, what does mobile technology do to how we seek knowledge, make sense of it and share with others?

Video [created and shared via mobile devices] is becoming an important medium of personal communication, evidenced by John Seely Brown’s example of a surfing community of practice as well as Chris Anderson’s examination of how web video powers innovation.

The big question is NOT how to blend mobile learning into our suite of existing tools, but rather what effect does this significant shift in the power of knowledge creation and sharing have on our understanding of workplace learning?

Collaboration is work

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As I get together with my Internet Time Alliance colleagues here in California, I really appreciate all of the connecting and conversing we’ve done over the past two years, as our shared experiences ease the path to further collaboration. Working collaboratively and effectively is a challenge for all organizations and must be continuously renegotiated as conditions change. Collaboration is not the same as cooperation. Collaboration is working together and achieving a shared objective. Collaboration puts cooperation to the test, with outcomes, objectives and responsibilities; constrained by time, resources and priorities.

Here are some collected thoughts on collaboration from others:

100 Web Tools to Enhance Collaboration (Part 3) | Ozge Karaoglu’s Blog

“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.” George Bernard Shaw

Network Weaving: The 4 Laws of Networks

The pragmatic reality is that innovation happens at the intersection of learning and cultivating diverse connections. When you have diverse connections in a network, learning almost cannot not happen. Networks literally become learning disabled if the connections become too homophilous and without learning, no innovation is possible.

ME2: Horizontal Collaboration « TheBrycesWrite

It is also important to point out that advocating Enterprise 2.0 / social collaboration isn’t necessarily the equivalent to denouncing all forms of Vertical Collaboration. Each have their value and their place for particular types of work. Advocating Enterprise 2.0 / social collaboration is the recognition that we’ve found something effective at filling in the knowledge gaps left by traditional Vertical Collaboration methods that prevent organizations from maximizing the capacity of their people. Thus, encouraging the use of capabilities and behaviors that fill those gaps – Web 2.0 / social media inspired methods proving to be effective for Horizontal Community Collaboration – will complement your traditional collaboration methods well.

At the Corner of Assertiveness & Cooperation: Collaboration > Trust Matters

Collaboration gets its power because it uses the energy of Assertiveness–ideas and real points of view, championed by people who care–and the energy of Cooperation–a willingness to make things work for all involved. From collaboration comes the best result, the idea or solution which is fashioned from everyone’s input and is better than what any one person could have come up with on her or his own.

Esko Kilpi Oy / www.kilpi.fi

Connections are not enough. Third threshold is true conversation. For connected thinking to occur, for both sides to find meaning in the interaction, participants must create a common context: What is it we are here to do? This takes time. Conversations cannot be hurried. Conversations cannot be tightly scripted and agenda based meetings separated from the practice of work. Knowledge work is talking and listening! The real challenge today is slowing down our thinking processes and increasing awareness of the thinking behind our actions and the assumptions behind our thinking.

Collaboration – If it Were That Easy We Would all Do It – Well

Will we ever learn? We place new labels on the issue (it’s not KM anymore, now its collaboration); new products emerge (SharePoint: “it does everything”), and all too often forget the lessons of the past. We believe that the “new focus” and/or the new technology will deliver on the promise without requiring any strategy.

Wise and interesting words

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Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week.

So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads. Dr. Seuss; via @nancyrubin

@GregoryLent : “We are shipping factories, jobs and wealth overseas so rapidly that it is hard to even comprehend what is going on.”

@Complexified : “Complexity demands new levels of relationship building skills. How we work together shares wisdom deeper than any one of us.” via @betseymerkel

“You can’t teach critical thinking without critical situations.” via @ethanbodnar

Higher education: “the mass production of people literally unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate charade.” via @anya1anya

“Since the way we run universities now is such a train wreck, what’s a better way?” by @danpontefract

I believe the education teaching process at high school and higher education levels need to radically shift. In both environments, I recommend teaching the theory of various subjects for half the day, and the other half is spent working on the amalgamation of subject-matter through application. That’s right – half the time in theory and half the time applying said theory in real world, critical thinking, cross-collaborative, multi-discipline ways that allow the student to actually practice ‘learning by doing’ concepts whilst learning the theory.

“If nothing else, I hope my book gets rid of learning styles” – Ruth Clark about her book Evidence-Based Training Methods; via @hjames

Thanks to a growing body of research evidence, we’ve learned a great deal in the last 20 years about which methods really work when training people. Yet many trainers are still using time-honored methods and assuming that they work — despite recent evidence to the contrary.

Interesting mind map on how decisions are made. by @jackvinson

I was Wrong.  by @timkastelle

In other words, to be innovative, we have to be wrong a lot. Being wrong is the first step towards being right.

Don’t hide your mistakes, learn from them. If every idea that you try works, it’s a sure sign that you’re not trying enough ideas.

What’s the relationship between R&D spending and Innovation? by @MartijnLinssen – Return on R&D

We can only simply notice that Apple is a very innovative company, for example. SAP spending 4 or 5 times as much on R&D doesn’t make them 4-5 times as innovative (I’m fairly sure even that no one could handle a company being 5 times as innovative as Apple).
Most R&D is window dressing and aimed to please the shareholder – not the stakeholder, that much Larry Ellison did prove in his speech at Oracle Open World.

A curved path to social learning

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When I was introduced to Charles Jennings’ C-Curve for learning & development (L&D) I wrote about it in the transition to networked accountability.

Charles’ C-Curve is a model in practice, based on his experience as CLO of Reuters. I see a parallel between this migration of the L&D department and the social order necessary to do certain types of group work [Refs: Cynefin – TIMN]

  1. L&D Autonomous = taking action as a Tribe of its own
  2. L&D Aligned with organization = coordinated with the Institution
  3. L&D with governance & guidelines = able to work in a collaborative Market
  4. L&D strategically aligned = a co-operative member of (a) Network(s)

I wondered if tribal organizations may be able to thrive in networks because they are already used to more freedom. I have noticed that it is difficult to convince organizations steeped in the institutional models that the networked model may be better to deal with growing complexity. Also, those who already have to respond to markets may understand the value of networks much better than institutions. Hence the advantage of the private sector in adapting new work models before the public sector.

In organizations and complexity, I discussed three archetypal organizational models and some of their defining characteristics.

Simplicity Complication Complexity
Organizational Theory Knowledge-Based View Learning Organization Value Networks
Attractors Stakeholders (vision) Shareholders (wealth) Clients (service)
Growth Model Internal Mergers & Acquisitions Ecosystem
Knowledge Acquisition Formal Training Performance Support Social
Knowledge Capitalization Best Practices Good Practices Emergent Practices

I’ve combined the C-Curve [X=Autonomy, Y= Strategic Alignment] with the knowledge acquisition models from these three organizational types in the figure below. The question that I ask here is whether it is necessary to follow the curve or if one can leap from Stage 1 to 4.  If not, that means that organizations need to understand and implement something like a human performance technology model for L&D before they can move on to social learning. Perhaps this is why social learning is being resisted or put into a formal training box in many organizations. They have not made the move to Stage 3 (Performance Support) yet. It’s too much of a leap for organizations in Stage 2. On the other hand, social learning is only a short leap for more tribal start-ups that have not developed any structure at all for L&D as they are quite comfortable with autonomy and messy networks. Stage 2 seems like the worst place to be.